Crisp: Football, with all its perils, returns

By JOHN CRISP

Thursday

Aug 30, 2018 at 2:00 AM

Playing a popular sport isn't worth dying over.

Football, at last, has returned.

My favorite team is the University of Texas Longhorns. I’ve followed them since I was a graduate student at U.T., when the team’s star running back was Earl Campbell. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1977 and went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Houston Oilers.

It was a pleasure to watch Campbell on the playing field, but in retrospect, it’s a mixed pleasure. Campbell is 63 now and still a presence on the U.T. campus. But he gets around only with considerable difficulty, usually with a cane or walker and sometimes a wheelchair.

He reluctantly admits that his health issues are related to the thousands of hard blows he absorbed during his career. Which brings us to an uncomfortable but undeniable fact: We enjoy football at an enormous cost to the health and well-being of its players.

Of course, Campbell might say that his infirmities are worth the fame and money that football gave him. But what about the current team of Longhorns, none of whom is likely to experience a career like Earl Campbell’s?

Or what about Jordan McNair? U.T.’s first opponent this season will be the University of Maryland. But the Terrapins will take the field without McNair, a 19-year-old offensive lineman, who collapsed during a May 29 workout and died of heatstroke on June 13.

And Maryland’s head coach, D.J. Durkin, has been placed on administrative leave. Maryland is investigating reports of abuse and intimidation in the football program, as well as an ESPN report that describes a “toxic” atmosphere that may have contributed to McNair’s death.

In the meantime, U.T.’s second-year coach, Tom Herman, appears poised to lead the Longhorns out of their recent mediocre lean years. And Herman is not a coach who rules by intimidation.

In fact, Herman tried an interesting motivational tactic recently. He showed his team a photograph of Thich Quang Duc. You’ve probably seen it.

On June 11, 1963, Quang Duc, doused in gasoline, struck a match to set himself on fire at a busy Saigon intersection. Malcolm Browne’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph shows the Buddhist monk sitting in apparent serenity as the flames consume him.

The lesson for the players? Herman tells a local sports reporter: “I’m not asking our guys to set themselves on fire — don’t get me wrong. The guy lit himself on fire and sat there and didn’t move an inch and didn’t utter a sound. That tells you a lot about the human mind, and if you train it properly, there’s pretty much not anything you can’t do.”

The point is well taken. But I wonder if motivating young ballplayers with a photograph of a man burning to death is, at the least, in poor taste. Or if reducing the desperate nobility of Quang Duc’s self-immolation to an inspirational platitude does damage to our sense of the relative values of the sacrifices that humans make.

The young players might have learned a better lesson from the context of Quang Duc’s death, which I suspect wasn’t mentioned.

In 1963, South Vietnam was 80 to 90 percent Buddhist, but the country was ruled by Catholics, under the presidency of Ngo Dinh Diem. Catholicism was a French import, and Diem’s corrupt government was seen by Buddhists as an oppressive holdover from colonial days.

During Diem’s rule, Buddhists suffered under blatantly discriminatory pro-Catholic policies. And with the United States propping up Diem, the situation for Buddhists had reached a point of desperation.

The photograph of Quang Duc’s suicide was in newspapers all over the world the next day, and it provoked a point of crisis that led to Diem’s overthrow and assassination in November 1963. It took another decade of war, but finally, in 1975, governance of all of Vietnam was returned to the Vietnamese.

What lesson might the young players learn from the story behind this grisly photograph? Maybe that life still has some things that are worth dying for, but football isn’t one of them.

John Crisp is a columnist with Tribune News Service. Reach him at jcrispcolumns@gmail.com.

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